Upon abnormal termination (colloquially known as a “crash”) of an executing program, the working memory of that program may be recorded to a nonvolatile storage, for instance, in an action referred to as a memory dump. The memory dump results in a typically large amount of data stored in one or a few files, which embodies the state of the program and/or the system at the time of the crash, and which can later be analyzed for debugging purposes. In the case of an operating system, the memory dump is referred to as a core dump, while in the case of an executing application, such as a Java based tool, the dump is referred to as a heap dump or Java core dump.
In the case of some execution environments, such as a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), a crash generates a heap dump which is written to a particular location of the file system. When several Java based tools are installed on a computer, the heap dump files thereof are generated in multiple different locations. This makes dealing with heap dump of multiple tools, and/or detecting occurrence thereof, difficult.